Hair Farm was designed and developed by Dr. Cem Yuksel over the course of more than 6 years.

When Cem Yuksel first started the Hair Farm project, the available technologies in Computer Graphics for modeling, animating, and rendering hair were very limited and under-developed for producing a hair software that would fully satisfy an artist. Therefore, while he was writing Hair Farm, he also got engaged in a number of research activities and proposed various novel technologies required for a solid hair modeling, animation, and rendering software.

After 6 years of research and development, he managed to solve the last piece of the puzzle with his invention of Hair Meshes. This novel hair modeling approach is presented in SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 in the Technical Papers session, among some of the top Computer Graphics research works being published this year.

Hair Farm is not just another tool for producing hair on virtual characters. It is a completely new design that combines state-of-the-art technologies with an artist-friendly user interface and a flexible workflow.

Some of the novel technologies in Hair Farm are the following:

• A whole new hair modeling pipeline combining the best ideas both the industry and the academia, including hair mesh modeling,
• An artist-friendly realistic hair material that can efficiently handle complicated light behavior like multiple scattering in hair volume to produce physically-based realism,
• A highly optimized high-quality ray tracer for hair that automatically handles anti-aliasing without the need to specify the number of samples,
• A whole new hair simulation technique that can robustly handle complicated models and advanced physical behavior like hair-hair interaction,
• Technologies in curve representations for modeling and rendering.

These novel technologies in their most advanced form only exist in Hair Farm. No other hair production tool, including commercial software and proprietary tools used in major studios, has these technologies. With Hair Farm you can produce images that cannot be replicated by any other software in the world!

Some of these technologies were published in some of the most prestigious journals and conferences in Computer Graphics. These include:

• Hair mesh modeling (SIGGRAPH Asia 2009)
  Cem Yuksel, Scott Schaefer, and John Keyser, "Hair Meshes," Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 (Transactions on Graphics), 28(4) 2009.
• Finding the "best" curve representations (Solid Modeling 2009)
  Cem Yuksel, Scott Schaefer, and John Keyser, "On the Parameterization of Catmull-Rom Curves," SIAM/ACM Joint Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling 2009.
• Efficient computation of multiple scattering in hair (SIGGRAPH 2008)
  Arno Zinke, Cem Yuksel, Andreas Weber, and John Keyser "Dual Scattering Approximation for Fast Multiple Scattering in Hair," Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2008 (Transactions on Graphics), 27(3) 2008.
• A fast and high-quality method for hair shadows (Eurographics 2008)
  Cem Yuksel and John Keyser, "Deep Opacity Maps," Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EUROGRAPHICS 2008), 2008.

In addition to these published technologies above, Hair Farm includes many novel proprietary technologies, some of which will be published in the near future.

Check out the full comparison between the Hair and Fur modifier of 3ds Max and Hair Farm.